


how to pay for my own life too

by MostWeakHamlets



Series: Cult AU [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Autistic Aziraphale (Good Omens), Child Abuse, Cult AU, Emotional Support Cat, Group Therapy, Happy Ending, Human AU, M/M, Punk Crowley (Good Omens), Religious Abuse, Religious Cults, Trans Aziraphale (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 20:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29863929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MostWeakHamlets/pseuds/MostWeakHamlets
Summary: "Growing up, Aziraphale knew long skirts and waist-length hair in braids."Aziraphale is raised in a religious cult that promises its members will all become angels when the rapture comes. He learns all the things a girl should know, but problems quickly begin to form when he attends school on the Outside. He starts doubting that girls his age are actually supposed to know how to deliver babies, mend clothes, and cook dinner for their 10 siblings as he's always been told.And he highly suspects that he's never been a girl in the first place.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Cult AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2195607
Comments: 13
Kudos: 56





	how to pay for my own life too

**Author's Note:**

> Please be aware that this fic is a little rough as it does have to do with cults. There are mentions of child abuse, religious abuse, miscarriages, and pregnancy. 
> 
> This is an old AU idea I've had in my head for a long time but only wrote one story for so far. This is more focused on Aziraphale than Crowley, but I would love to write more about Crowley's upbringing some day!

Growing up, Aziraphale knew long skirts and waist-length hair in braids. He knew feeding babies and baking and sewing. He knew preparing dinner for his brothers and father alongside his mother and sisters, timing it perfectly to set the plates on the table when they came home from work or play. He knew babysitting the neighbor’s kids and ironing and washing clothes and doing what he was told, when he was told. 

His mother told him often how he had been born into such a great honor. She told him, as he watched his brothers run off to play, how grateful she was that he was her third daughter. How lucky she was to have a third pair of hands around the house as he grew and how excited she was to include him in her own, little world. 

Before his first period even came, he stood at bedsides as a midwife would, holding a bowl of clean water and trying not to look below the poor woman’s waist. She would cry out in pain, and he would block it out until he heard the screams of a baby, and he took it as his cue to smile. He dumped bloody sheets into washing machines and learned to swaddle the infant and hold them while the mother took a moment to recover. He sat in living rooms with tiny, red handprints at his collar and a stench of fluids and sweat stuck in his nose, hoping to get home before dark so that he still had time to swing in his backyard before bedtime. 

He chopped vegetables with a knife he was probably too young to wield and donned oven mitts that went to his elbows before leaning into a hot oven. He was splashed by boiling water and was quickly dried off with his mother’s apron. She held him against her leg, and he breathed into the fabric of her dress as she petted his hair and reminded him to be careful. 

Aziraphale knew what good girls did and didn’t do, how they grew up quickly and how they took care of their families. He stayed within the walls of his church and his community, and he listened to his preacher and his parents. And he did what good girls were supposed to do. 

* * *

His first day of school on the outside, as he would eventually call it, was like a visit to the zoo. 

He gaped at the boys with hair to their shoulders and the girls with heavy makeup around their eyes and who worked— _ worked _ —in clothing stores after classes. They wore skirts shorter than what Aziraphale wore, and he wondered how they got away with showing off their knees. He had begged for his mother to let him pick out skirts that showed his  _ calves _ . 

His elder siblings at the school repeated to him again and again that  _ those  _ students lived without God.  _ Those  _ students weren’t following their church’s plan. So, it was best to stay clear of them.

But Aziraphale was fascinated by everything he saw, and his classmates were equally fascinated by him and his modest clothes and his name. Girls motioned for him to sit with him at lunch and quizzed him on everything he knew. They pointed at people in magazines and gave him a pair of headphones to listen to music. And every time Aziraphale would shake his head and say, no, sorry, he had never heard or seen any of these people before. 

And initially, his cheeks burned. His stomach twisted in guilt as if he did something wrong. He wrung his hands together and thought about pretending like he did recognize all those people and bands. But the girls laughed and fondly called him weird and told him great stories about their jobs, musicians, actors, and movies. They brought in more magazines to teach Aziraphale the newest celebrities and explained the plots of new television episodes. They wanted to include him, he realized after a week. Not mock him. And he learned that he liked being included quite a bit when it didn’t mean delivering babies or wrestling his brothers out of bed and to the breakfast table. 

But the girls’ fond laughter stopped when he eventually admitted, months into his first year, that he had never owned a television, and he had never seen a film in theaters. And their smiles and gentle teasing turned into more pressing questions with their own nervous ticks. 

_ Do you really not listen to music in your house? Like, good music?  _

A tug at an earring. 

_ Your parents won’t even let you buy books if they’re not for school?  _

Picking at a hangnail. 

_ What do you mean you’re in church services all day on weekends? Like all morning on Sunday, right? That’s what I do. Oh.  _ All  _ day? Saturday  _ and  _ Sunday?  _

Biting a lip. 

And they invited him out after school, encouraging him to tell his parents that he was part of a study group and needed help with maths. Algebra, after all, was the largest bane of Aziraphale’s existence at that point and he had been sent home with a few notes about low marks (all of which went ignored as his parents reminded him that he wouldn’t really need to be an expert in algebra). So, he lied, feeling a little thrill in his stomach, and walked home with the girls.

He sat on a fuzzy carpet and gathered around a television with snacks that came wrapped in plastic packages. He held a VHS in his hand and twisted one of the white, ridged circles until one of the girls yanked it from his hands. 

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just—I already had it back to the beginning.” 

“She’s just anal, Zira. Don’t pay attention to her.”

He watched the movies with wide eyes once a week and returned home, satisfied that he had his own little secret. He showed his parents his completed homework as proof that he  _ had  _ been studying and didn’t mention that he had one eye on Molly Ringwald dancing in her school library the entire time. 

He learned quickly that on the outside, girls didn’t live like he did. They talked back to their parents but still kissed them on the cheeks. They went to work and made their own money that they spent on makeup, movie tickets, and jeans ( _ jeans, _ Aziraphale always thought, were pretty cool if only because he had never seen a woman in trousers before). They had messy rooms and played loud music within them. Aziraphale has been exposed to a whole new world, and he always rinsed crisp and candy fragments out of his mouth before returning back to his own. 

He thought girls, as he was seeing them from his school, were pretty neat. 

But  _ guys _ , he learned, were even neater. 

They didn’t extend the same invitations as the girls did, but Aziraphale sometimes found them hanging around his new friends. They smiled at him and complimented his hair—the white-blonde hair he had begun to let loose with only a headband to keep it from falling into his eyes. They were quicker to laugh and scoff at his ignorance and at the way he rocked his body in excitement and bounced, but he found himself not entirely minding. To him, it was worth it if it meant he could be in their presence. 

He found their hair and clothes the most interesting. The boys he kept in his company looked like they hadn’t seen a hairdresser in months. Outside of school, outside of their uniforms, they wore jeans and checkered shirts and t-shirts. Some kept cigarettes tucked behind their ears.

And Aziraphale  _ really  _ liked their bodies. They were tall and had faint muscles on their arms and legs. Their upper lips and chins sported patchy stubble. To adults, they were nothing more than lanky, awkward teenagers. But it couldn’t matter any less to Aziraphale. He liked their jaws when they firmed up and squared off as they got older. He liked their large hands and the way so many of them seemed to shoot up overnight until they were a head taller than Aziraphale. 

He liked them romantically, he was sure, but he also liked pretending he was one of them. He liked mimicking their poses as they leaned back in their chairs and sprawled out against lunch tables and in the hallways. He tried holding his cigarettes like them, curling his fingers around them and finishing them in a few, long drags. He imagined himself with their hair and their jackets and their jeans and with their long legs and toned arms. 

Aziraphale studied the boys harder than he studied his books.

He stood in the mirror many nights, his siblings sleeping behind him, pulling his hair up and tucking it up so it hit his chin. And then higher than that so it hit his ears. He wore baggy shirts and pressed his breasts against his chest as far as he could while examining himself. He figured that maybe he would like himself a bit better if he didn’t have such wide hips or if his chest wasn’t so prominent and if some of the roundness to his body could be evened out just a touch. He thought that maybe if he didn’t have to wear his dresses and skirts and nightgowns, he would feel a little more comfortable. Maybe even cutting his hair could clear out some of the fogginess that plagued his head somedays. It would be just a little change. Something just to let him feel more comfortable in front of a mirror. 

Such an idea was shut down by his mother before it even finished coming out of his mouth. Good girls didn't need to change. 

* * *

His friends were eager to leave school by their final year, but he couldn’t understand the rush to be done. Once he was done with school, he would return home and be expected to find a husband and start his own family. There were men, his parents told him, who were waiting for him to start courting. He was beautiful and smart and already had the makings of a good homemaker, and he could have his pick of the young bachelors in his community. 

But Aziraphale didn’t like the looks of any of them. They were young, sure, but they were still  _ older  _ than him and didn’t have any of the awkward limbs of youth that Aziraphale had grown to cherish. They wore bland shirts buttoned nearly to the collar and tan trousers. There was no  _ flavor _ to those men, Aziraphale thought. What could a man that didn’t have nicotine under his fingernails and didn’t listen to loud music in his car offer him? 

There was nothing else to do, though. He’d find the man with the funniest sense of humor, who would take him on drives, who possibly had a rebellious phase of his own. And that was what Aziraphale would have to call his late teens years in order to not fully mourn them. A phase. 

His friends talked about the universities they wanted to go to and compared applications and marks and essays. They were given recommendations from their teachers and handed pamphlets and booklets and had after-school meetings to discuss their progress. Aziraphale watched them chatter away at lunch while thinking about who he was going to invite to dinner that night. 

When it was his turn to sit down in front of a teacher to tell her that he had no plans on going to university and instead was going to take “the family route,” he quickly realized that he shouldn’t have said anything at all. He should have lied and repeated the name of some school another classmate mentioned, and he should have pretended that he was filling out applications that he had foolishly left at home and couldn’t show her. 

His teacher, who was always so kind and praised Aziraphale for being clever every week, stared at him with creases in her forehead. She leaned forward over her desk and asked, quietly, to clarify what he meant. He was bright and loved school from what she could tell. What was the plan for a family, anyway, she asked. Was he already engaged? She didn’t know that he had ever dated. Did he really have plans to have a child soon when he was still 17? His body wasn’t ready for that yet.

Aziraphale knew he had made a mistake. His cheeks were on fire. 

It was the early 1990s, and Aziraphale was still learning that many believed that a woman’s purpose was not to birth as many children as they could and devote their lives to God and their church. 

And that scared him. 

He imagined himself with children, carrying them for nine months and then laboring in his bedroom as the neighbors wiped his brow and and a child changed his sheets. The idea of even getting pregnant was revolting. It made him feel sick. It kept him up at night, his chest hurting and the sheets feeling as if they were trying to strangle him and tear him apart. 

There was nothing he wanted to do less than go through that whole mess, but he had always thought that he would just have to buck up and do it. 

Because if he didn’t have 10 children just as his mother had, if he didn’t marry a man with a side part, if he didn’t stay at home and cook and clean, then God wouldn’t accept him. 

He could justify the sneaking around after school. The movies and music and testing out eyeshadow for a few hours all seemed okay. If God didn’t want him around those things, he wouldn’t have made the girls who showed them to him so nice and friendly. Surely, God could forgive him for laying powder over his eyes and watching TV. Surely, God put his friends on the Earth for a reason. It made sense to allow himself a little freedom so long as he, in private, apologized for it. 

But forgoing family and growing his church was scary.  _ That  _ was the biggest sin, according to his pastors.  _ That  _ would prevent somebody from fulfilling their duties. And if someone didn’t fulfill their duties… 

He looked his teacher in the eyes and remembered the way his father prayed for forgiveness when his mother miscarried her 7th child. She had to have done something wrong, a pastor explained to him. It was punishment, and if she didn’t repent and repair her family, she wouldn’t be blessed with more children. And she would be left behind. 

It was the threat that Aziraphale always had over his head. 

Being left behind. 

He was 10 years old and his siblings prayed for his mother and begged God to allow her to be an angel at the rapture. She had been a good wife. A good mother. She served her church and community, and she deserved to be an angel when God needed them. They all sat in their beige living room—a tiny room that wasn’t fit for such a big family—and cried. 

And Aziraphale cried at his teacher’s desk that afternoon in the empty classroom. He cried until his eyes and cheeks hurt, and he tried to explain, through gasping breaths, that he couldn’t go to university and begged for his teacher to forget he had said anything. 

And then he cried for his friends that would be left behind. 

And then cried for himself some more because he  _ did  _ want to go to university. 

And he cried as the teacher asked him even more questions and cried as the principal took notes and cried the next day as he was pulled from class and spoke to a man in a suit, and he cried that night when, instead of going home, he slept in the teacher’s guest room. 

And he cried when his teacher explained to him that she believed his family meant well but that they might have gotten wrapped up in something “not good” and that university would be good for him for so many reasons. 

And he cried when he returned home that weekend and was locked in a confession booth for five hours as men in suits closed a shallow investigation.

* * *

Aziraphale lost his friends during the final stretch of that year. His parents forbade him from any more “study groups” after school while rumors spread about his home life, and quite quickly, his friends left him alone. He was no longer invited out as they already knew the answer. They no longer included him in conversations about anything but schoolwork for fear they would get him in trouble at home. And eventually, he was too embarrassed to even eat lunch with them and disappeared every day to his teacher’s classroom or a small nook under a staircase somewhere. 

He missed the hands of boys who would pass him cigarettes. He missed their bony fingers and stained nails and seeing them in jeans after school. He even missed the way they made fun of him. 

His teacher helped him gather university applications and mailed them for him, stuffing the envelopes with her own checks for fees. She found scholarships and taught him about loans and campus jobs. They rushed to fill everything out and called schools to ask for extensions for deadlines and explained, a bit vaguely for pride’s sake, Aziraphale’s situation. 

It finally clicked for Aziraphale, with waves of anger and resentment and depression, that he was in a bad spot. That no other family in his school lived the way he did for very good reasons. That having nine siblings wasn’t normal and perhaps a bit frowned upon because who could possibly take care of all of those children? That all of the confused looks he had gotten for years couldn’t be chalked up to “cultural” differences. 

University would be a test. If the church really loved him as they said they did, they would let him go. They would congratulate him and see him off. They would let him do what made him happy. 

But if they didn’t, then he had an answer to years of growing doubt. 

Aziraphale submitted applications to a total of seven universities, each one making him nearly sick with hope. 

In the end, he was accepted to six. 

He sat in a confession booth for another five hours the weekend before he was due to leave, listening to his preacher tell him that he could still turn down the temptations of evil and that he was not yet totally lost. University wasn’t for women. Universities taught gross, indecent things and were full of depraved people without any morality. The booth was so hot and stuffy from the summer heat, he had sweat pouring down his neck and staining his white blouse. There were moments he was sure he would faint or be sick from it all, but he stayed upright, far too stubborn to let himself open the door for fresh air. 

Aziraphale sat with his mouth firmly held shut when he was asked to repent for simply applying, when he was dragged out of the booth and into a classroom and yelled at to turn down the university, the scholarships, to stay with the church. To fulfill his duties or else. 

Or be left behind. 

His eyes glazed over at the tiny desk meant for children half his age. He thought about how he would decorate his apartment, what books he would take with him. He thought about maybe getting a plant to hang in a window. A plant would be nice. Something to take care of and admire as it grew and flourished by his hand. 

He thought about finding new hands. 

There would be more boys to look at, to imitate. Maybe they would be gentler, and maybe Aziraphale would be ready for a gentler boy. Boys with jumpers and glasses and kind smiles. Boys who carried books and would lend Aziraphale their jackets. Boys with clean, neat hands. Aziraphale could see himself in those boys. 

The preacher was red in the face by the time he deemed Aziraphale hopeless and pathetic and weak. 

Aziraphale silently stood and walked back home in a daze. If fulfilling his duties meant he had to spend all of eternity with people like that, then maybe he didn’t want it. 

Maybe people who screamed at young people for wanting to go to school were not God’s chosen angels. Why would God make his angels so cruel and unloving and heretics so kind and generous? Why would God build schools and give gifts of knowledge to professors if they were so depraved? 

Why would God invent scissors if he wasn't meant to ever cut his hair? 

* * *

Aziraphale’s first year of university was total freedom. He had a job at the school’s library that paid little more than he needed to live, but he didn’t mind. He poured himself into his studies and squirreled away money until he had enough for a plant to proudly hang in his window. 

He bought himself his first pair of jeans and found that they were quite comfortable even if he thought he looked odd in them. He bought large, comfortable jumpers and a pair of trainers. He looked quite adrogynous from the neck down, and he admired himself in mirrors. Perhaps an adrogynous style was what he wanted all along. It was fashionable, he told himself. All sorts of people played with their style on the outside. 

The time to cut his hair came around his first week of final exams. 

He sat in the middle of an apartment with a towel around his shoulders. His friend, who wore her hair in a buzzcut, took her scissors—kitchen shears—and cut off the first chunk of the white-blonde curls. She waved it in front of his face and dropped it to the floor. He gasped and felt the back of his head where it came from. 

By the time they finished, his head felt a few pounds lighter. His hair was cut just above his chin. It was uneven and the curls had been yanked on and pulled out and frizzed out to give him the appearance of a cotton swab. But it felt better. Much better. 

That weekend, another friend took him to her sister. She was a real cosmetologist and when she had heard about the poor student’s hair that had been victim to kitchen shears, she offered to fix it for free. 

She asked Aziraphale what he  _ really  _ wanted and he thought that maybe he’d like his hair even shorter. And again, sitting in someone’s apartment with a towel around his shoulders, his hair was cut. 

This time, it went above his ears. 

“It looks good on you,” the sister said. “Boyish. It’s cute.” 

_ Boyish.  _

_ ish.  _

Aziraphale smiled at himself in the mirror she held up for him. He loved how it felt against his fingers. He loved the breeze he felt. He loved that, above the neck now, one might be a bit confused about calling him ma’am or sir. 

There was something  _ right  _ about it. He wanted to do more. He wanted to change everything. 

He wiggled around on the stool, rocking his body from side to side, and laughed. The woman laughed with him, a hand on his shoulder. 

And every year, his hair got shorter. 

And every year, he saw doctors and his arms got stronger and his hips more narrow and his voice deeper and his jaw firmer. 

And every year, he learned to love his reflection just a little bit more. 

* * *

Aziraphale tried not paying attention to the ache in his shoulders. 

But it was hard when he had had his binder on for 10 hours. Usually, by that point in the evening, he was in a more comfortable outfit and relaxing in his own home. He would have a cup of cocoa or tea and a book in his favorite overstuffed chair rather than a wobbly, plastic one in a circle of other anxious people. But he didn’t want to miss a meeting. It was his seventh one, and he already found them to be helping, though the disruption of his usual routine was a bit jarring. 

There was something about being in a room with people who had his life—who understood everything he went through—that gave him a little bit of closure. Gave him a little sense of belonging. And after 16 years on his own, it was about time he found some relief. 

A young girl, barely out of her teen years, sat on his left. Her hair was in a single braid down her back. Her hands were folded together and laid on top of her corduroy skirt. She stared at the ground. Aziraphale wanted desperately to reach out to her and maybe touch her shoulder and whisper to her to ask if she needed a glass of water.

On his right was a man perhaps his own age. Perhaps a little younger. He had the shoulder-length, wavy hair that Aziraphale had loved on boys decades ago. He wore a dark, denim jacket and tight trousers. But the most striking part of him was his sunglasses which he never took off. 

The man ran a hand through his hair when the group leader gestured to him and invited him to introduce himself. 

“How do I do this?” he mumbled. “I’m Anthony. I was in a cult growing up. Is that it?” 

“You can say as much or as little as you’d like, but this is your chance to share if there’s anything you’d like us to know tonight.” 

“Uh.” The man’s outer appearance seemed to suggest that he was outgoing and tough, but Aziraphale could see how he tensed when put on the spot. “I was born into my cult, and I got out when I was 17, and I’ve been doing my own thing since.” 

Anthony declined to open up any more but was praised for saying as much as he had. And as Aziraphale himself did when someone praised him, Anthony didn’t seem to know how to respond. He jerked his head and nodded and the conversation moved on. 

It was raining by the time the group dispersed, and Aziraphale was eager to get home and into something more comfortable with a good book.

He passed Anthony, who stood under the small awning of the building. It did little to protect his entire being from the rain. He had a cigarette in his mouth and was shoving his hands into his pockets. 

“Do you have a lighter?” he asked. “I think I lost mine.” 

Aziraphale nodded and pulled his silver, boxy lighter out of his pocket. Anthony rolled it over in his fingers before flipping the lid up and flicking his thumb over the wheel. 

Aziraphale pulled his own carton of cigarettes out of his jacket. 

“I’m trying to quit,” Anthony said, passing the lighter over. “But I had to bribe myself to get here tonight, so I bought a new pack on my way.” 

“That’s not unreasonable.” Aziraphale sucked in his own blend of tobacco and nicotine. “I had to bribe myself to get here for the first time.” 

And every time after that. 

They were getting quite wet, and soggy cigarettes weren’t very appealing. 

Aziraphale opened his umbrella and held it over both his and Anthony’s heads. Anthony looked up at it and moved a little closer to better fit under it but didn’t acknowledge it any further. Aziraphale could see him shiver and shove his free hand into his pocket. The poor thing was so thin and underdressed, he must have been freezing. 

They smoked until their cigarettes were burned to nubs. Aziraphale shoved his butt into the designated ashtray at his side. Anthony dropped his onto the ground and stomped it out under his hefty boot. 

“Will I see you next week?” Aziraphale asked. 

Anthony smiled, and Aziraphale tried imagining what his eyes looked like under his glasses. “Maybe.” 


End file.
